NOSTALGIA BETWEEN INNOCENCE AND RESPONSIBILITY

As the examples above make clear, the nostalgias we have described and the moral evaluations assigned to them tend to fall along generational lines and indeed function as important signposts of group belonging. Message boards on the internet, for example, feature topics that refer specifically to a child’s experience during late socialism; responses to the questions “You come from the 70s/80s if …” include “Your parents were summoned to school because you were trading [foreign] gum wrappers right in front of the teachers’ room” or “You remember that you shouldn’t take candy or chewing gum from foreigners; they say one boy was poisoned that way.” The slower pace of obsolescence of socialist goods, however, also meant that a greater range of ages shared similar experiences and objects, so that “generations” under socialism did not change at the same pace as today, where the difference of a few years can mean mutual unintelligibility in terms of popular culture. Thus, the appeal to socialist memory in itself can function as an appeal to collective experience (or rather, an experience fantasized as collective the moment it vanished). Post-socialist nostalgia both reinforces generational boundaries and provides the fantasy of uniting across them, as when members of different generations join their voices in singing the “yard songs” of the past.
What enables this fantasy of cross-generational belonging is that the younger generation’s nostalgia is often misrecognized as following the same logic as that of the older generation, both by the individuals themselves and by cultural critics and observers (as one of our opening quotes suggest). While to some extent this perception is accurate (all generations are subject to Proustiana, although the physical objects that trigger it may differ across generational lines),^[1] the older generations of Russians and Hungarians do not always partake in the more consumption-oriented nostalgic practices of those under forty, nor does the younger generation intend practices constructed not only as nostalgic but also as fashionable to be open to everyone. In turn, those over 50 have their own reasons for voicing nostalgic sentiments. These reasons are usually spoken of in terms of the older generation’s economic deprivation and sense of alienation from post-socialist reality, although this rhetoric of alienation (which presupposes a preceding stage of authenticity) should not be taken at face value since in itself it can be thought of as part and parcel of the nostalgia industry. A more adequate way to conceptualize this experience of post-socialist transition is as an experience of radical disjunction between one’s habitus and the field of cultural and economic practice – a condition which generates what Bourdieu calls hysteresis of habitus: the unsettling lack of fit between one’s internalized dispositions and the new “rules of the game” which constantly reminds individuals of their lack of agency and control.^[2] Understandably subject to hysteresis of habitus to a greater extent than their younger counterparts, the generations that came of age prior to 1985 may voice nostalgic sentiment not as a way to express their allegiance to the socialist field of practice, but rather to articulate their frustration over the current state of disjuncture.
Most cultural momentum arguably lies behind nostalgia experienced by thirty-somethings, since the political upheavals of the late 1980s and early 1990s paralleled their own coming of age. Hence the many the films that chronicle adolescent turmoil against a backdrop of political transition. Personal rites of passage invariably take priority over national ones; as one character in the Hungarian film Moscow Square (2001), a gentle comedy that follows a group of graduating high school students in the final days of socialism, declares: “Who the fuck is Imre Nagy?”^[3] (Imre Nagy, prime minister of Hungary during its failed 1956 uprising against the Soviets, was exhumed and reburied in the spring of 1989, and this televised event was one of the major defining landmarks of Hungary’s peaceful political transformations.) Indeed, this emphasis upon adolescence is metaphorical as well as literal, given the widespread perception that these societies were collectively forced into adulthood by the political transition, no longer sheltered by the hand of state paternalism.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/nostalgia1.jpg>

Fig. 1. Poster advertising a presentation of the the film Kis Utazás.

Projecting nostalgia into childhood makes it possible to evade its political implications by tying it to the period when perception is by definition pre-political. Those who came of age at the time of the political transition are old enough to have concrete memories of the previous regime, yet young enough to discard possible questions of responsibility and petty compromise altogether. Yet the very fact that these subjects explicitly dismiss their nostalgia as mere longing for the universal experience of childhood suggests the opposite: the persistent suspicion that the politics of these practices are something that needs to be justified. Each new film or fad has thus been accompanied by articles and reviews which make a point of arguing that the objects and practices themselves had little to do with politics and even when they did – i.e., the Young Pioneer songs mentioned earlier – they were not actually perceived as such at the time. In other words, they claim, nostalgia for the relics of an era does not mean nostalgia for its political ideology as well, any more than nostalgia for the 1980s in thirty-something Americans represents an endorsement of the policies of the Reagan administration. The difference is simply that the material culture of this generation’s youth is an artifact of a now-discredited regime and any manifestation of nostalgia therefore tends to be placed within an assumed political framework by locals and foreigners alike.
But just as childhood is a time when one is not even aware of political considerations, the objects now targeted by nostalgic desire are associated with the practices and material culture of everyday life, a sphere that many people choose to remember as similarly depoliticized. That is, not only are people nostalgic for the dreams of their youth and for the certain level of material comfort and security provided by the paternalist state, but they are also nostalgic for the very distinction between public political involvement and private material concerns encouraged in post-1956 Hungary and in stagnation-era USSR. Unlike the nostalgia for one’s understandably limited perception of childhood, this nostalgia is based upon a misrecognition since the material sphere was political: the Kádár and Brezhnev regimes drew their legitimacy from the unwritten social contract through which the populace retreated from public involvement into private affairs and their own material concerns, receiving in exchange relative security and freedom from political harassment. The political nature of the material sphere accounts for the emphasis post-socialist discourses place upon consumption and consumer culture. It also underlies the frequent adage that “under Brezhnev, everyone had enough to eat.”
Nostalgic memory, then, is purposefully constructed as non-political in both the object of its longing and in its contemporary implications. But this is where the Russian and Hungarian cases differ since the political context in which such remembering takes place plays a crucial role in how politically (in)consequential nostalgic memory can claim to be. In 2001, for example, the head of the socialist Hungarian Workers’ Party, Gyula Thürmer, proposed that the state permit the erection of a statue to János Kádár, the leader who had led Hungary through three decades of relative economic security under socialism. Given the Workers’ Party’s perennial complaint about its lack of proportional representation in Hungary’s private and state news media, Thurmer’s suggestion, which he also sent to leading politicians, probably would have failed to register on the public radar had it not been picked up by one of Hungary’s recently-established commercial television stations, TV2. It devoted one of its most popular programs, the weekly news-roundup Fokusz (Focus), to examining this campaign and to collecting viewer opinions via its weekly phone-in poll. To everyone’s apparent surprise, 80% percent of those who phoned in agreed that Kádár deserved a statue of his own and the question for the following week’s poll, (“Is it better now to be young?”) also received an emphatic response in favor of the past.
This catchphrase later found its way back into public currency as the Workers’ Party campaign slogan for the national elections in 2002, but to no one’s surprise, neither it nor any other party was able to the leverage emotional capital of Kádárism into political gain. Indeed, in the first round of elections, the Workers’ Party once again failed to overcome the five percent hurdle necessary to gain parliamentary representation. As the interviews Fokusz conducted during their polls had made clear, nostalgia for Kádárism could only have political force insofar as it was constructed in explicitly nonpolitical terms. As long as politicians, celebrities, and average Hungarians alike could justify their fond memories solely in terms of their “stomachs” – that is, their memories of material comfort and security – the emotions summoned by nostalgia were effective across the political spectrum which at that time was split fairly evenly between right and left. The Hungarian Socialist Party, impatient to re-invent itself as a European socialist party with no links to the past, could make vague reference to protecting the concerns of the “simple people” without taking responsibility for the injustices of socialism; while the right-wing could dismiss nostalgic practices as merely the expression of dissatisfaction with post-socialism on the whole rather than an endorsement of communism and hence a specific rejection of right-wing anti-communist discourse. Bringing nostalgia explicitly into the political sphere would thus invalidate its usefulness and emotional legitimacy. It would subject the left to a critique of the Kádárist regime’s now-shunned lack of democratic values, and it would be read as an overwhelming rejection of right-wing ideology.
Instead, nostalgia became one of the implicit targets of more general anti-communist rhetoric deployed by the then-ruling center-right coalition government during the elections. By warning that the victory of the Hungarian Socialist Party would mean the “return” of communism to Hungary, it attempted to represent the socialists in the worst possible light, as not a new European party but an old and corrupted one that bore all the sins of the past era. Nostalgia was rarely mentioned explicitly, but by summoning such counter-memories and associations among its constituents, the center-right coalition implied that post-socialist nostalgia threatened Hungarian democracy because it “whitewashed” the past. Indeed, nostalgia was all the more dangerous because it was not recognized as such. The government ultimately lost it’s bid for re-election, but given the fact that its defeat was narrow, this campaign can nonetheless be interpreted as successful in mobilizing public sentiment and transforming the emotional tenor of the elections from a political battle to a “holy war.”^[4]
Going back to the Fokusz poll, a similarly nostalgic breakdown of public sentiment is not at all unthinkable in the Russian context: a recent poll by the Yuri Levada Center reports that 46% of the poll sample preferred the pre-perestroika state of affairs, although only 5% see a return to this era as possible.^[5] However, the (mis)memories of socialist-era political disengagement appear more problematic here because they embody not only recollections of the past, but blueprints for the present. In other words, if the return of socialism at this point in history is widely recognized as impossible, the return of the familiar social contract of the stagnation era and the promise of stability in exchange for political disengagement represent the very essence of Putin’s domestic politics. The non-political nature of nostalgic memory thus becomes incorporated into the profoundly political project of deepening the gap between the “authorities” and the populace, and the material memory of socialism turns into a stake in this game.
This trend towards employing nostalgia politically can be read, for example, in the electoral material of Aleksandr Pleshakov, a member of pro-Putin United Russia party who ran in the 2003 Duma elections. Pleshakov’s strategy of attracting voters included repeated appeals to the shared experiences of socialism, from the memories of the “holiday feasts” which “smelled of laurel leaf and vanilla” and were preceded by “store rush, queues for chicken, canned green peas Globus and Ptich’e Moloko candy boxes” to the experience of subbotnik labors preceded by “a ritual drink chased by cheese spreads and sausage for 2 roubles 20 kopecks a kilo.”^[6] Innocuous by themselves, memories of everyday realities of socialism are invoked here as a type of political mandate. They are expected not only to position Pleshakov as “one of our own”, an individual sharing the readers’ experiences and memories, but also to implicitly point to holiday feasts and collective drinking rituals as the ultimate stuff of life, thus sidelining political involvement and public participation as something inconsequential and unnecessary. The non-political promise of nostalgia, already witnessed in the Hungarian case, here turns into a tool of political alienation, uncontested by rivaling political parties.
Furthermore, because the longing for the lost fantasy of the West can coexist in the Russian case with the longing for the fantasy of one’s own imperial power, nostalgic recollections retain a possibility of yet another slippage: the very same practices/images that signify lost body of cultural knowledge for some may be read as longing for the lost imperial grandeur by others. The leaflet for a karaoke cruise on board of the Alexander Blok cruise ship (see Fig. 2) illustrates this duality well. In the Hungarian context, a poster like this would most likely be read in along the lines of the Dreher beer commercial discussed above and it is not impossible that the actual clients of the karaoke cruise ship would partake in this reading as well. But given the images used in the leaflet, another reading is possible, one that accentuates the imperial pride and the mourning for the lost of prestige in superpower competition (in which the conquest of space was, of course, one of the privileged arenas).

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/nostalgia2.jpg>

Fig. 2. Russian karaoke party poster.

Practices of nostalgia in Russia, as a result, retain a specific open-endedness that permits not only multiple readings, but also a possibility of misrecognition by those who enact them of their own motives. Disaffection and longing caused by the loss of a utopian fantasy can easily be misread as a longing for the Empire’s lost greatness. For an example of such a mechanism of misrecognition, consider the much-discussed intelligentsia’s drift towards populist and traditionalist politics.^[7] Originally fuelled by the loss of intelligentsia’s utopian fantasy of the democratic capitalist West (a fantasy in which the intelligentsia as a social group was particularly invested), this disaffection is now interpreted (often by members of the intelligentsia themselves) as the mourning for the Soviet imperial presence, which is now phrased in terms of a “strong state that is respected on the international arena.” On the surface, nothing could be further apart than these two fantasies. But the effect produced by the loss of one is so similar to the effect triggered by the loss of the other that two formerly opposite groups (democratically-minded intelligentsia and “etatist” nationalists) often find themselves on the same side of the barricades.
The similarities in the nostalgic sentiments visible in Hungary and Russia, therefore, should not detract from an appreciation of the very real differences in which these similar practices function in each particular case. A number of other contextual factors contribute to these differences as well. To note the most obvious one, since the socialist project was very much imported into Hungary, appeals for its political rehabilitation are all but impossible for parties with even a moderate nationalist agenda.^[8] In addition, Hungary’s recent ascent to the EU makes the meaning of the term “irretrievability” entirely different from the one it has in the Russian context. In the former case, nostalgia’s fixation on irretrievability has the meaning of being caught in the irreversible flow of European integration, while in the latter, it has more to do with the point of origin (and thus the irrevocable drift of a former superpower) than with the point of a (yet uncertain) destination.^[9] Irretrievable as both of these transformations may be, they thus generate different possibilities for collecting political dividends from avowedly non-political nostalgia: Hungarians, as it were, can “afford” to be nostalgic because they see no actual possibility of return to the Kádárist era whereas Russian nostalgic practices continuously face the danger of generating political capital for populist and imperialist projects. Thus, when individuals indulge in them, the important difference lies not with the inherently different structure of nostalgic desire itself in the Russian case, but rather with the wider space of political possibilities within which this desire can (or cannot, as in the Hungarian case) generate political capital.
There is a sense in which, even in Hungarian context, nostalgia plays an implicitly, if not explicitly, political role. Post-socialist nostalgia enables Hungarians “to not talk about the past while talking about it”: to retain one’s childhood memories while refusing to pass definitive judgment upon the larger political and historical context within which they took place.^[10] For some, this provides a way to maintain personal continuity in the face of historical disjuncture and irresolution; nostalgia enables its subjects to integrate their memories into personal narrative without either endorsing or condemning an era not yet perceived to have fully resolved into “history.”^[11] For others, particularly the younger generation, the value of nostalgia lies in its function as a communicative practice. The emphasis is not upon establishing a frame to give sense and coherence to one’s personal set of memories, but rather upon finding a common idiom for discussing the past with others, regardless of how these memories fit into one’s larger family or social history during the socialist era and independent of how positively or negatively one chooses to evaluate the former system as a whole. From this standpoint, nostalgia for the everyday life of Kádárist Hungary appears to be one of the few safe discourses available for talking about the past. Indeed, given the often-polarized political and cultural climate of post-socialist Hungary, such nostalgia offers perhaps the only idiom through which to find common ground in discussions of the socialist era.

CONCLUSION

In May 1999, the Sakharov Museum in Moscow opened an exhibit entitled “The Idea of the Museum of the USSR.” The idea behind this exhibit was to generate responses and create a blueprint for a permanent exposition of the same name which would, as formulated by the Museum’s director and human rights activist Yuri Samodurov, help the new democratic Russia “to comprehend and experience the epoch of USSR’s existence as an epoch of a different civilization which sank into Lethe like Atlantis.” The response that the exhibit generated was highly controversial. Some visitors were happy to partake in a collective project of defining the nature of the Soviet era; many of the themes they proposed for display in the future museum would be already familiar to a reader of this article: artifacts of socialist period, elements of material culture, “official” and “unofficial” art and so on. “I would like [for the museum] to show everyday life – with hopes, love, wishes for the better,” – wrote one visitor in the exhibit’s Guest book, – “lace curtains and children’s beds. And how my Mom had to toil to procure even the bare necessities for her children.” Yet the idea of such a museum also elicited protests which came not only from communist hard-liners, but also from those who saw Samodurov’s project as a dangerous attempt to cater to the public’s nostalgic sentiment. For them, the initiative meant that “the rumors of the Empire’s death were greatly exaggerated,” as one liberal critic put it and the Sakharov Museum was in the process of creating “a living corpse”.^[12]
The controversy surrounding the project of the museum illustrates the complexities and tensions inherent to the study of nostalgia. In light of the political leverage held in Russia by the Communist Party, the reservations of the museum’s opponents are not hard to comprehend. Yet, given the idea’s authorship, it is clear that imperial nostalgia was not the only – and, indeed, not the main – sensibility underlying this project. And if that is the case, one has to wonder whether, in resisting the sentiment that kept much of East European socialist-themed projects going, the museum’s opponents were not, in fact, refusing their compatriots the humanity of their memory of the past and whether by their vocal protests against “museumifying the Empire” they did not, in fact, keep it more alive.^[13]
This text is an early attempt to destabilize the prevalent notion of nostalgia as an internally coherent body of cultural practices, and to show that the meaning and logic of nostalgic practices reside within specific social contexts in which they are embedded. It views nostalgia as both more universal than is usually recognized (in that the same logic of nostalgic desire animates many practices in the two locations we have surveyed) and more unique to each cultural setting (in that these practices are inevitably transformed by the political agendas and pre-existing ideological tensions specific to each locale). More thorough ethnographic analysis is necessary before reading politics into nostalgia and nostalgia into politics. But while we have argued that nostalgia cannot be assumed to be political (just as the politics of the past cannot be assumed to represent nostalgia), politics are nonetheless at work, both in what these practices accomplish and in who does the labeling and naming of practices as nostalgic.
Nostalgic practices can represent an effort to move beyond the past and to render the past harmless, but it can also create phantasmagoric loyalties and divisions. But what often matters most for these distinctions is not the inherently political content of specific nostalgic practices, but rather the political field of possibility in which these practices can be put. It is in this aspect that more studies of politics of nostalgia are needed before the messy concept obtains the character of an analytical category.